Description
Global International Relations (GIR) is grounded in a West/non-West binary on which its denunciation of Western dominance builds. This concerns both the dominance of Western thought and perspectives and dominance in publication patterns. However, this paper argues that the binary is unsustainable and that GIR’s reliance on it perpetuates and produces forms of marginalisation in knowledge production and scholarship. Perspectives and communities that do not fit the categories of West/non-West fall in between the cracks of the divide, and dominance in current-day publication patterns is confined to a small groups of states rather than simply Western, as the paper demonstrates through a survey of prominent IR journals. Second, it identifies and discusses three domains in which marginalisation manifests itself in GIR as a consequence of its reliance on the West/non-West binary: the liminal semi-periphery, the West subaltern, and the non-West subaltern. To illustrate, the paper discusses the Indo community and one of its prominent members, Tjalie Robinson, as an example of a hybrid group that falls outside the scope of dominant, traditional IR and GIR. The experiences and perspectives of the Indo community force the IR discipline to reconsider the meaning and implications of core concepts and approaches of IR and defining moments of international history, including decolonisation, the historiography of political independence movements in former colonies, feminist critical security studies, and the construction of European identity and multicultural society. The paper concludes that globalising IR requires the abandonment of essentialist categories in both GIR’s conceptualisations of the world and in its categorisation of IR scholars.
